Thank you Geoff! Had a quick read but need to drill down more...good stuff.

So you know what needs to be next? Please go ahead with a more affordable turntable for the B&O enthusiast!

That document is much more than a technical sound guide for the Beogram 4000c.

It is a very interesting read about vinyl history, technology and Beograms, even for non BG4000c owners.

19 pages of pure gold.

Thank you once again, Mr. Martin.

Olivier

Beogram 4000c is not based on Beogram 4000.  Period!

And under the Sound tab;
"Frequency range : 50, 60 Hz"
- Eh?

The tapped wooden cabinet is a shame. It looks like an apple crate.
And of course it's also a shame that they had to paint the arms black because Soundsmith can't make the lovely metal housed cartridges, only the black plastic-look ones.

The nicotine colored metal panels is also a set-back. The alu panels were so beautiful and classic. Now it has all been given the color of the 1960s and 70s that I have spent hours on end trying to remove from smokers units.
Yikes. To me it looks dirty and sticky. I can almost smell it.

One can only hope that the new electronics, RIAA etc. was made to compensate as much as possible for the harsh, sterile and lifeless sound of the Soundsmith cartridges.

Else a nice deck.

Martin

How do you really feel Martin? :-)

I agree with some of your points but I think out of all of this 95th Celebration event there is an important, and kind of cool, statement about the Beogram 400x turntable.

We have long wondered if Bang & Olufsen would produce a new turntable. We also wondered what they would do regarding a phono cartridge. People pondered what sort of modern features it would have to have.

In the end...Bang & Olufsen went with a true classic, one of their classic Beogram 4002 editions. I think the naming of Beogram 4000c is more related to the 400x series that the first Beogram 4000 started.  It probably would have been much more difficult to acquire and update the original Beogram 4000 turntable. I am glad they didn't go that route. The original Beogram 4000 turntables started it all and should be left as they are. Restored to their original state. 

The most positive aspect I see in this is that the long awaited new Bang & Olufsen turntable is a restored classic. A Beogram 4002 turntable. It has to be their most popular turntable of that era. Plenty to choose from to produce the ninety-five special editions...and restored to new condition it still performs brilliantly. Those of us that have continued to maintain and restore our own Beogram 4002 turntables have known for years that those turntables are built like tanks. They will play records forever when properly maintained...and play them beautifully. It is pretty amazing to think that an almost fifty year old design is still the chosen design today. 

And...a big thanks to you Martin for helping us owners out with replacement parts and technical advice.

John 

Got my copies! 🙂

 

Don't get me wrong.
I think it's a great idea to look back and do something like this, and I think it's a great deck.
The use of massive wood rather than veneer is welcome but the fingered joints are blocking the streamlined design and reminds me of cheap and bulky 1970s livingroom furniture. My sister had a sofa, a chair and a coffeetable that looked just like that. None of that is going inside my house today.
Take a look at the real Beogram 4000 (or 4002 for that matter), those end joints are fantastic in that they are really not there.
The Beogram 4000c fingered ends are made wider than the cabinet trim is thick. It makes the cabinet look thicker than it is. B&O never before deliberately tried to make anything look bulky, let alone thicker than it is.
Quite contrary, they always strived for light, sleek and elegant, and that's what the original decks were, despite them being quite squar'ish.
Sadly (and clearly) Jacob Jensen is no longer around, and apparently noone could fill his shoes, or B&Os things would still end up classics.
Having said that, visible screws would have been worse. - Or fake screws.

The nicotine colored panels. Well, they may look alright now (perhaps primarily to young people, who never found themselves in a smokers home), but I fear they will end up like the green Beolab 4000 and red Beovision models, with owners trying anything and their best to get the outdated color off a few years after buying.
If one of the earlier models, say the Beolit 39, was "recreated" in 1975 for B&Os 50 years anniversary, it would have come in a selection of red-burned orange, watering can green and ocher because that was the modern colors back then (unless Jacob Jensen had a say).
Surely it would have looked the part at the time, but only for a few years.
Luckily, the 50 years got celebrated with a red Beolit portable radio, which is still nice looking (thanks to Jacob Jensen).

Coloring something to look modern does not make a classic.

For a horrible example look at Peugeot cars. When brand new they look modern, sometimes even futuristic. Really the part!
Look at the same car again five to seven years later and it looks 25 years old.
There are reasons why Jaguar E-type, Porsche 356 and Ferrari 246 Dino are forever classics.

But thanks for not adding Bluetooth or some other protocol or connection that will be outdated in five to ten years.

A new Beogram would indeed be interesting. But this is not a new Beogram.

A brand new Beogram 4002 would've been nice (but call it something else).
DIN and RCA at the back. Yes, please.
Remote control - yes please, and/or at least the "later" type of datalink to fit the other classic products - yes, please.
An RIAA preamplifier that can be switched on/off as needed, discretely built as the better of B&Os were - not those OpAmp based ones used in the later decks.
Detachable dustcover? Why? The hinged cover of the Beogram 2000/3000 was a huge improvement over all earlier models. No longer did you have to locate a (safe!) place to store the dustcover when you want to play a record (the safe place not being the conveniently empty chair you will be sitting in in a few seconds).
Keep the design elements that made the original decks look sleek and elegant, - the ones that made other producers throw in the towel.
Keep the sleek alu tonearms that blend in nicely with the backdrop panels rather than stand out in protruding contrast.
Same goes for the operating panel.

I suppose my question is, what would a new turntable be like if designed by Jacob Jensen?
There's a good chance it would end up a new classic, and there's a good chance that even I would buy one.

Martin

Dillen wrote:

No longer did you have to locate a (safe!) place to store the dustcover when you want to play a record (the safe place not being the empty chair you will be sitting in in a few seconds).

I knew somebody was watching me! 

Hi Olivier,

Just doin' my job.. but: thanks!. :-)

Working on this project, I realised that I didn't really know very much about vinyl - not really. As I've told many people lately, I'm old enough that many of my textbooks had chapters on phonographs in them - but young enough that we didn't cover those chapters, since it was a dying format (I was in one of the first tonmeister classes at McGill that used digital tape recorders and editors. This also meant that I was in one of the last classes to learn how to edit by splicing 1/4" analogue tape, and how to clean and align a 2", 24-track analogue reel-to-reel.)

So, you're right - that TGS isn't really about the Beogram 4000c specifically. It's more like a distillation of things I've learned in order to bring myself up to speed on vinyl in general. If it had been a TGS for one turntable, it would have been much shorter.

I'm already working on the update. I also have some long-term plans to be a little more elaborate in some of the information via my website - but that'll take a while.

Cheers
-geoff 

Hi Matador43,

I'm curious - how did you re-arrange the page order to make the printing to A3 format happy?

When I'm bookbinding, I normally do this manually - but if you have an automatic way to do it, I'd like to try it out.

Cheers
-geoff